In the middle of the journey of our lifeI found myself in a dark wood,for the straight way was lost.

In the middle of the journey of our lifeI found myself astray in a dark woodwhere the straight road had been lost sight of.

...so full was I of slumber at that point where I abandoned the true way.

Dark, profound it was, and cloudy, so that though I fixed my sight on the bottom I did not discern anything there.

Translation: Consider well the seed that gave you birth: you were not made to live your lives as brutes, but to be followers of virtue and knowledge.

In the middle of the road of my life I awoke in a dark wood where the true way was wholly lost.

I awoke in a dark wood where the true way was wholly lost.

merton:

In Louisville, at the corner of Fourth and Walnut, in the center of the shopping district, I was suddenly overwhelmed with the realization that I loved all these people, that they were mine and I theirs, that we could not be alien to one another even though we were total strangers. It was like waking from a dream of separateness, of spurious self-isolation in a special world, the world of renunciation and supposed holiness. The whole illusion of a separate holy existence is a dream. Not that I question the reality of my vocation, or of my monastic life: but the conception of “separation from the world” that we have in the monastery too easily presents itself as a complete illusion …We are in the same world as everybody else, the world of the bomb, the world of race hatred, the world of technology, the world of mass media, big business, revolution, and all the rest …This sense of liberation from an illusory difference was such a relief and such a joy to me that I almost laughed out loud …To think that for sixteen or seventeen years I have been taking seriously this pure illusion that is implicit in so much of our monastic thinking … I have the immense joy of being man, a member of a race in which God Himself became incarnate. As if the sorrows and stupidities of the human condition could overwhelm me, now I realize what we all are. And if only everybody could realize this! But it cannot be explained. There is no way of telling people that they are all walking around shining like the sun…”

Eliot had found that, with Dante and "with several other poets in languages in which [he] was unskilled," this sense of having got something from a poem before really understanding it was not fanciful. When he verified such experiences on fuller knowledge, he found that "They were not due . . . to misunderstanding the passage, or to reading into it something not there, or to accidental sentimental evocations out of my own past. The impression was new, and of, I believe, the objective 'poetic emotion'."This perhaps fanciful idea was immensely influential, and beneficial. It encouraged the writer to give Dante a go in the original, and to look to him as a model. When we come upon a superb Dantescan passage in a subsequent poet, pre-eminently of course in Seamus Heaney, what we are very likely to be witnessing is the influence of Eliot.

Nobody talks back to Pound in his 'Hell' cantos, any more than a symptom talks back to a diagnostician; nobody but Pound talks at all."

Lay down all hope, you who go in by me." As the It

"Through me the way is to the city dolent;/ through me the way is to the eternal dole;/ through me the way is to the people lost.")

Sayers "does the best in at least partially preserving the hendecasyllables and the rhyme."[10]

verything has been said but it hasn’t been said by you (whoever you are). And if you can find a way to speak that is inimitably yours, then you have a chance to add to the legacy of utterance about common issues. That’s where invention comes in. And imagination. And formal innovation.